Across all sectors, industries, and geographies, demands continue for the electronic industry to provide products that are lighter, faster, smaller, multi-functional, more reliable, and more cost-effective. In order to meet these requirements of so many and varied consumers, more electrical circuits need to be more highly integrated to provide the functions demanded. Across virtually all applications, there continues to be growing demand for reducing size, increasing performance, and improving features of integrated circuits.
These seemingly endless requirements are no more visible than with products in our daily lives. Smaller and denser integrated circuits are required in many portable electronic products, such as cellular phones, portable computers, voice recorders, etc. as well as in many larger electronic systems, such as cars, planes, industrial control systems, etc.
As the demand grows for smaller electronic products with more features, manufacturers are seeking ways to include more features as well as reduce the size of the integrated circuits. Increased miniaturization of electronic products typically involves miniaturization of components, greater packaging density of integrated circuits (“ICs”), higher performance, and lower cost. As new generations of electronic products are released, the number of integrated circuits used to fabricate them tends to decrease due to advances in technology. Simultaneously, the functionality of these products increases.
Semiconductor package structures continue to advance toward miniaturization to increase the density of the components that are packaged therein while decreasing the sizes of the end products having the IC products. This is in response to continually increasing demands on information and communication apparatus for ever-reduced sizes, thicknesses, and costs, along with ever-increasing performance.
Different challenges arise from increased functionality integration and miniaturization. For example, a semiconductor product having increased functionality may be made smaller but may still be required to provide a large number of inputs/outputs (I/O) interface. The size reduction increases the I/O density or decreases the I/O pitch for the integrated circuit package and its respective integrated circuit carriers.
The ever-increasing I/O density trend presents a myriad of manufacturing problems. Some of these problems reside integrated circuit manufacturing realm, such as fine pitch connections and reliability of these connections. Others problems involve mounting these increase I/O density integrated circuits on carriers for packaging. Yet other problems reside in the realm of the printed circuit board or the system board that receives the integrated circuit package having the fine pitch I/O.
As an example of the problems of reduced I/O pitch, wire bonding on the substrate is limited to a flat width on a bond finger or trace surface to secure a reliable bond on it. A bond which is partially positioned outside a width of the bond site of bond finger or trace can result in weak bonding or shorting with adjacent lead fingers.
Thus, a need still remains for an integrated circuit package system providing low cost manufacturing, improved yield, and improved reliability. In view of the ever-increasing need to save costs and improve efficiencies, it is more and more critical that answers be found to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.